FIT
100
Lab
Activity 5: Seeing is Believing--Or is
it?
Adobe
Photoshop and Image Alteration
Winter 2002
In Lab 3 you learned the
basics of creating a HTML document to post on your web page and Assignments 1
and 2 helped you search for sites and then establish criteria for evaluating
the credibility of those web sites.
Today we will focus on
issues of authentication by learning the basics of Adobe Photoshop to alter an
image and make the alteration look authentic.
The images given to you to work with have no copyright associated with
them. You are allowed to use them
because each comes from a government agency that does not hold copyright or
require copyright fees to be paid for non-commercial use of images.
Adobe has a great deal of functionality
in the area of graphics and image creation and manipulation. However, today’s lab will focus on using
certain tools to eliminate and alter areas of an image. We will not cover all tools, which will
require you to play with them on your own if you wish to use them as part of
your project.
·
Use
Adobe Photoshop to select and manipulate areas of an image
·
Remove
and add selections to an image
·
Through the manipulation
of photos, create awareness about issues of authenticity and misinformation in
photographic displays.
Adobe provides a work area for images that includes a Selection Tools Box. Hover over each tool with your mouse for the name:
Marquis Tools:
The marquee tools let you select rectangular or elliptical areas in
an image. Crop Tool: This tool allows you to select an area
of an image and crop it. Move Tool: Lets you drag a selection or layer to
a new location in the image. Lasso Tools: The lasso and polygon lasso tools
let you draw both straight-edged and freehand segments of a selection
border. Magic Wand Tool: The magic wand tool lets you
select a consistently colored area (for example, green grass) without having
to trace its outline. Clone Stamp Tool: Takes a sample of the image,
which you can then apply over another image or part of the same image. Each
stroke of the tool paints on more of the sampled image. [Also called Rubber Stamp Tool] Eyedropper Tool:
Sample color from an image to indicate a new foreground or
background color. Paint Bucket Tool: Fills adjacent pixels that are
similar in color value to the pixels you click.
Tool Descriptions for this Lab
You will be using the Crop, Lasso, Move, Eyedropper, Stamping and Magic Wand Tools for this lab.
The first thing to do is get a copy of the images we’ll work with and save them to a disk or a local drive. When we finish the lab, use FTP to send the finished images to your Dante account for access later on.
i. File>Save As… and give them each a different name.(ex. StHelensCopy.jpg)
ii.
Close the originals.
iii. Open up the copies you just created.
Whenever you want to indicate that you are dealing with one image versus another, make sure the image is “selected”. That is, click somewhere on the image you want to work with to select it.
Notice the color in the Red Square image is a bright but the St. Helen’s photo is a little darker. To lighten or darken one of the images, adjust the color levels:
Using the slider bar on the right and left sides of the Input Levels, decrease the amount of darkness in the image, without making it too bright. When you are satisfied, click OK and go back to your image.
5. Save
your changes
a. File>Save
i. If the Options box is not showing for Brushes, go up to the menu bar:
a.
Window>Show Brushes
ii. Select a brush that will cover the area. You will decide whether to use soft or hard edges
iii. Move your mouse over the pedestrian and click. They are replaced with the stamped area.
***NOTE:
Any time
to make a move or take an action that you don’t want to keep, you can use the Edit>Undo
button to remove the last step taken.***
You can use the Magic Wand Tool to select whole areas by their similarity in color.
Use the ALT key if you want to subtract selected areas one at a time
In a few moments you’re going to put the image of St. Helen’s into the backdrop of Red Square. To make sure there is color continuity in the photo of Red Square, let’s fill the area you just selected in Red Square with the blue in the Mt. St. Helen’s image.
**When you
are finished, select one of the Marquee tools so you don’t paint
everything you click on!**
c. File>Close Close the St. Helen’s image.
In order to save our new image as a .jpg or a .gif, we need to flatten the image. To do this you will combine the two layers that currently make up the image into one. This reduces the size of the file. Once an image is flattened, the layers can no longer be modified.
The obvious choice for a picture in the background to replace Mt. Rainier would have been something like the Mt. St. Helen’s explosion. On your own, for more practice, go find a photo of a volcano, or a famous city skyline, and insert it into the image the way you inserted Mt. St. Helen’s. Use the copyright free images in the same folder as Mt. St. Helen’s and Red Square for practice.
Now is the obvious time to give a
little background and advice about the use of images on the web. Most of you don’t have any intention of
using the images created for your project or here in lab for anything other
than completion of a homework assignment.
Regardless of your intentions for the use of this material, it is your
responsibility to understand the laws surrounding copyright and the ethics of
photo manipulation.
http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/cprtindx.htm#top
This lab is focused on the use of Adobe Photoshop for photo manipulation. There is a great deal of functionality of the software that we are not covering. Plan on searching out different ways to use the tool to manipulate images for your project.